Replying to LO23786 --
cont.
[Host's Note: Andrew continues his quote from Maturana... Rick]
-Love is visionary. We think that other lineages of the human kind may
have become extinguished through the negation of love in mutual
destruction or ecological blindness in their domain of existence. We are
not talking about love as a virtue or as something good from a moral,
religious, or philosophical perspective. We are talking biology, we are
talking about our animal constitution as the particular kind of primates
that we are as members of an evolutionary trend centered around the
conservation of the biology of love and the expansion of intelligence.
Love is the grounding of our existence as humans, and is the basic
emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings. Furthermore, we shall
remain humans of the kind Homo sapiens amans , only as long as love
remains as the central emotion in the systemic conservation of our
particular human identity as such, so that we do not become Homo sapiens
aggressans through the conservation of living in aggression. It is as
loving languaging beings that we can still become aware of what it is to
be a human being, and it is only as loving animals that we can still
create the conditions for the upbringing of our children in the
mother/child relation and, later, in the schools and during their growth
into adulthood, in a way that they grow and conserve themselves as self
respecting socially conscious loving and caring adults by living with them
in the biology of love. Love is our natural condition, and it is the
denial of love what requires all our rational efforts, but what for, when
life is so much better in love than in aggression? Love needs not to be
learned, it can be allowed to be or it can be denied, but needs not to be
learned, because it is our biological fundament and the only basis for the
conservation of our human beingness as well as our well being. Love is not
a virtue, indeed love is nothing special, it is only the fundament of our
human existence as the kind of primates that we are as human beings. At
difference from love, aggression needs to be cultivated or it fades away
as we meet each other in the simplicity of our humanness. The systematic
systemic denial of love through conversations that through rational
arguments that use notions of efficiency, economy, progress, purity,
obedience to god, or perfection, pretend to justify such negation, and is
a carefully cultivated feature of our patriarchal culture. But the denial
of love, is the source of all human suffering as an addiction to
righteousness and pain. Let us abandon this addiction, let us stop
cultivating aggression as a manner of living that leads to the prevalence
of the Homo sapiens aggressans that is already with us, let us live in the
biology of love, let us open our intelligence in a conspiracy that leads
to the prevalence of Homo sapiens amans . Why not? Is it difficult, or is
it that we do not want to do so out of greediness, ambition, envy, or
fear? Well, which ever the case, love is the cure as it opens our
intelligence for reflection and give us the possibility to choose, and as
we choose in awareness of our human condition, love becomes our basic
reference, because the biology of love is still our ultimate ground and
source of recovery of any distress though our realization as human
beings.' Humberto Maturana, Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zoller, Opp, G.
Peterander, F. (Hrsg.): Focus Heilpadagogik, Ernst Reinhardt,
Munchen/Basel 1996.
And, I discovered this text over the Christmas period, what a gift of joy!
I can then add another colour to my palette, love. ;-)
Maybe it was there all along and I just did not see it?
Maybe I felt it pulling at me like gravity though? Or like a breeze?
How can I convey this unseen 'colour of colours' to you? Would you allow
me to share some once private notes from Vincent van Gogh? Have you ever
wondered how he would have spoken if he had been a writer and not a
painter?
' I have made a series of colour studies in painting, simply flowers, red
poppies, blue cornflowers and myosotys (sic), white and rose roses, yellow
chrysanthemums - seeking oppositions of blue with orange, red and green,
violet and yellow seeking -les tons rompus et neutres -, to harmonize
brutal extremes. Rendering intense colours and not grey harmony. Now after
these intense gymnastics I did two heads (portraits) which I dare say are
better in light and colour than those I did before. So, as we said at the
time, in colour seeking life true drawing is modelling with colour...¦[in
love].'
If the world is a gigantic painting then all the colours may be suspended
in one medium that is love.
And Vincent- 'Rose roses', now is that a tautology?
The girl in the Gestapo cell, what is she to you or me? Well I can only
speak for me.
When she scrawled those words and names into the wall the 'colour
emanating' was 'love', not for herself, not for her mother, not for her
torturers or for any particular 'thing' of this world or any posited
'other' outside of it, it was I believe scrawled into the wall of
impending darkness through lightness and 'sureness' and 'openness' and
'fruitfulness' and 'wholeness' and 'otherness' and 'spareness' and
'liveness'.
FOR ALL LIFE.
It was and remains a manifestation of 'one to many mapping'.
Listen 'for' if you care to.
Van Gogh reflects upon the interface of business and creative art by way
of writing on the tulip trade, after that 'bubble' too had burst !!!
' It is like the tulip trade, under which living painters suffer rather
than gain any benefit. And it will disappear like the tulip trade. But one
may reason that, though the tulip trade has long gone and is all but
forgotten the flower growers remain and will always remain- thinking what
abides is like a kind of flower growing, and as it concerns me, I reckon
myself happy to be in it.'- As if a precursor of Maturana he wrote, '- Not
always literally exact, or rather never exact for one sees nature through
one's own temperament.'
For Vincent nature (LIFE) was to be absorbed. Apprehended and
apprehending. Though, 'He was not (just) absorbed by nature, - he absorbed
it into himself; he had forced it to unbend, to mould itself into the
shape of his thoughts, which is to follow him in his flights, even to
submit to his highly characteristic deformations...¦. he spares no effort,
to the benefit of the trees, skies, flowers and fields, which he inflates
with the astonishing dream of his being.'
A moment of metanoia for me began with a 'song' or prayer and the awful
(awe-full) realisation that the girl in the cell lives on and on and on
through time and space as no less 'connected' to me than the last person I
think I came upon - because I choose to make no distinction between what
others might call fact and fiction, here and there, now and then, it is
all 'one thing' called 'reality' for me and I sometimes wonder if in the
attention to her she can attend to you and me,- listening distanced upon
the silence of her prayer as it swirls around in her mind.
Well, she changed my life.
How?
'Through the astonishing dream of HER being.
How else?
Though I try not to grasp for her; I try not to grasp for anything or
anyone anymore. I am more prepared to 'slip'. I let as much as I can
'slip' into the complex inner ground where 'inter-mingling' takes place in
chaos and complexity- rather like the soil. Looking to the 'ground' more
than occasionally and we may discover another part of us and in our more
proper/whole place that is that you and I are self-same, merely diverse
and differing which is possibly the ground of our very creativity.
Imagine; what if all the eyes, ears, minds all the organs of perception
and communion that attend to this list were the essential same thing, what
if we were literally one body, one soul. We are bringing forth a new
reality just by attending and we simply amplify it when we scribble our
scribbles on that 'doomsday skin' that is the universe. Existential
philosophy implies we all 'live lives of quiet desperation'- interesting
turn of phrase, 'live lives.' Strange but though still 'comfortable' as a
tautology. (The black dog is black). Not far off the 'mark' I reckon, if
we just peel back a few layers of our deceit and conceit.
This 'information revolution' is no more and no less than the collective
tacit realisation of the need to restore ourselves as we diverge through
increasing complexity the means to re-join, it is like that medium of
colour called love, pervading everything.
It is like a new form of gravity, a new form of energy, a new form for
expression and a new suspending suspenseful medium.
Maturana says we are all co-creators and artists in this new 'medium'
through which we can invoke any evocation.
He, like de Lange and many, many others see a new possibility upon the
horizon, one through which we co-create spontaneously in a medium which is
that of inexhaustible love. We are all there is. This for me today in the
'praxis of my understanding' is both my wisdom and my metanoia. -I can
save myself.
In the 'multiversa' I can apprehend infinite suspended particles that wave
through all matter, condensing occasionally, instantaneously, and
irreversibly into 'love' and when we have ears to hear and eyes to see we
will hear a song that was begun a long time ago in which authentic human
expression resides in the acknowledgement that it was as universum and now
as multiversa desiring all the while to love us as much as we might desire
to love it, but first we must come to love each other, unconditionally and
creatively and before that we have to find some way to love ourselves and
in this there may be no point or purpose if in discovering that gift we
have no one 'other' to share it with, and that is I sometimes sense the
greatest fear that sits within the 'darkbright' chord; that 'we' ARE NOT.
That beyond that 'NOT self' there is 'no other'.
But the 'brightdark' that I might glimpse now and again and teach myself
not to grasp for is that there is no self without other.
That maybe all other IS myself.
That is what I learn in this 'place' and that is what I am going to tell
anyone not of this place who now asks me.
-'Suspenseful Love' (my coined term) may be rather like the tiny nest when
I 'know' it is there in the hedgerow but I cannot see it , (Oops ;-) it
was 'designed and built' that way because a differing mother does not
trust me to care or love for her infants, and so I learned if I just leave
them there but never the less 'apprehending' I can still sense the growing
chicks who, year upon year, sing a generational 'short' song that lasts
forever and ever and ever and my mind returns me to another 'invisible
cell' in which differing freedom is determined differingly.
And new angels appear...¦each with a name.
This is only MY responsibility now toward OUR multi-future.
Best wishes,
Andrew Campbell
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